


A Beautiful Thing That I Couldn't Escape

by Chash



Series: Cecil Meets the Family [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 19:36:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, explaining Cecil to his mother is much easier than explaining upstate New York to Cecil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Beautiful Thing That I Couldn't Escape

Carlos assumed that explaining Cecil to his mother would be the difficult part. She's not budging on the Christmas visit, and Carlos is just as glad; holidays in Night Vale are dangerous, and while he's not sure Cecil _can_ be killed, he'd rather not risk it.

"He can be a bit eccentric," he warns her.

"Oh, they're all eccentric."

"He does a--" Carlos searches for a lie that will explain things. "An old-fashioned horror radio show. He likes to stay in character. He's such a kidder."

"We'll love anyone you bring home, _mijo_. Just tell us when you're arriving."

And he feels good about it, up until the exact moment that he realizes he'll have to prep Cecil for upstate New York.

*

"The snow's not really going to smell like raw meat," he says, over breakfast.

"Hm?" asks Cecil. His hair is rumpled and his glasses are crooked; it makes Carlos regret getting out of bed, except there's something in Cecil's bed that fills him with unspeakable existential dread from six a.m. to six p.m. on alternate Tuesdays.

"When we go to visit my parents," he continues. "The snow there doesn't smell like meat. It's crisper."

"Like barbecue."

"No."

"Hamburger?"

"Not like any kind of meat at all."

Cecil frowns, and Carlos figures that's enough for one day.

*

He calls Cecil immediately after getting off the phone with his sister. "Ana is coming," he says.

"Who?"

"Ana, my sister, she's coming to Christmas with her husband and their kids." He swallows. "She's a librarian."

The pause is so long Carlos begins to worry. Cecil could be arming himself. They're not leaving for another week, but Cecil doesn't fool around with librarians. Finally, he says, "Why was she allowed to reproduce? Surely she was sterilized as part of her MLIS completion ritual."

"We don't sterilize our librarians in Potsdam."

"How do you control their malevolence?"

Carlos runs his hand through his recently trimmed--with Cecil present and granted veto power over the barber, to maintain perfection--hair. He never wanted to tell Cecil this. "Librarians aren't evil where I come from. They're--helpful." He remembers his high school librarians, and amends, "Not all of them. But they're no more evil than anyone else."

"Was your mother at least sterilized after giving birth to such a monstrosity?"

"She didn't have any more children," Carlos says, which is true, and apparently good enough for Cecil.

*

"Have you ever even been on a plane?" Carlos asks, on their way to the airport. He can't imagine Cecil outside of Night Vale. Part of him is worried they'll never make it. Scientifically, it makes no sense, but neither does casual-gravity Friday, and he still experienced it last week.

"Of course," says Cecil, sounding hurt. "Don't you remember? I backpacked across Europe."

"Oh, right," says Carlos. He'd been in the stage of attraction to Cecil at that point where he felt miffed about the references to previous partners, and had turned off the show after the subject came up.

"But I've never been to New York."

"They have a dog park they're allowed to look at, think about, and enter."

"Don't the hooded figures make them uncomfortable?"

"We don't have any hooded figures."

Cecil, for the first time Carlos has ever witnessed, looks terrified.

*

His mother is there to greet them at the airport; his sister and brother-in-law won't be in for another few days. She hugs and kisses him and gives Cecil the same treatment with no hesitation, which reassures Carlos that Cecil either is or at least looks like a passable human being.

"It's so good to meet you!" she gushes. "Carlos has told us so much about you. But he never told us how handsome you were!" she adds, with a glare at Carlos. He'd like to see _her_ try to describe Cecil's physical appearance.

"Oh, well, yes," says Cecil, flustered. It's always nice to see him so out of his element, blushing and smiling, so different from the confident radio personality. "You too."

"Come on," she says. "Juan is in the car. Carlos said you two needed to go to the library!"

Cecil gives him a look somewhere between terrified and wounded, and Carlos just puts his arm around him and leads him out of the baggage claim. "It will be good for you."

*

The first librarian is young and pretty; she and Carlos went to high school together, although she was a few years younger.

"May I help you?" she asks, and Cecil hisses at her.

"I think we need more time," Carlos says, as Cecil desperately looks around for something to defend himself with. "But thank you."

"You allow them to communicate in English?" asks Cecil, horrified. "And there are no chains!"

"Her name is Becca, we were in high school together."

But Carlos finds he's scared of the library too, unable to shake the feeling that something's going to kill him in the biographies section, jumping every time a nice, pleasant librarian comes over and asks if they need help finding anything.

*

He only manages to look at the dog park for twenty-eight seconds; he just can't go any longer. When his father asks if they'd like to go in, he and Cecil both shriek.

*

Ana arrives a few days before Christmas, and Cecil doesn't hiss at her. He instantly takes to Hector and Elisa, at least, and privately confides to Carlos that, for librarian spawn, they seem to have turned out surprisingly well.

"They don't even have visible gills," he says brightly. "Maybe we shouldn't sterilize them after all."

Carlos shudders. "Night Vale is doing the right thing with its librarians," he says.

"Oh, Night Vale," says Cecil, with longing. "My Night Vale. I wonder how it's doing?"

They tried to find out, but Night Vale is difficult to google, and impossible to communicate with by telephone, unless you have a few days to interpret the codes and portents.

"We'll be home soon," says Carlos, somewhat unnerved to realize that Night Vale _is_ home. He used to worry about convincing Cecil to leave with him when he inevitably tired of trying to explain the unexplainable, but now he wonders if the bigger problem won't be telling his family why they can never visit him.

"Have you decided which member of the family you'll be sacrificing on the New Year? They're all quite pleasant, even your sister. It must be a difficult decision."

Carlos laughs and rolls over, curling against Cecil's warm side and listening to his heart beat, and the mysterious other noises his chest makes. "About that," he says, and braces himself for another long conversation.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Beautiful Thing That I Couldn't Escape by Chash [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/935564) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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